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Mastering C# for .NET Developers

Installing Visual Studio

Set up a local development environment using Visual Studio or the .NET CLI, manage SDKs, explore unit testing, and review troubleshooting tips.

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Visual Studio setup (Windows)

Although this course does not require a local Visual Studio installation, we recommend downloading it from the official website to practice local development. The Community version is free and will be sufficient for almost all of our purposes, except commercial development.

Downloading Visual Studio
Downloading Visual Studio

Launch the installer after the download finishes. The next window asks what workloads we want to install along with the IDE.

Visual Studio is highly functional and can be used to develop applications using a variety of programming languages and frameworks. Since we are only building C# and .NET console applications, the default workload settings are sufficient.

By installing Visual Studio, we install the necessary compilers and the latest version of .NET. After installation is complete, we can start with our first program.

Launch Visual Studio and click on “Create a new project”. In the next window, choose “Console Application,” give our program a name, choose the version of .NET to use, and click on “Create”. These steps produce a newly created project:

Visual Studio interface
Visual Studio interface

The main editor window displays the generated C# source code. In modern versions of .NET, this generated code uses top-level statements. This means it might contain just a single line of code to print text to the console.

The “Solution Explorer” on the right displays our project’s structure. In our case, it is the default structure of a C# project:

  • The Dependencies node contains the frameworks and packages that our project relies on. For a standard console application, this includes the core .NET runtime libraries (Microsoft.NETCore.App).

  • Program.cs contains our source code. C# code files use the .cs extension.

Installing the .NET SDK on Linux

While we demonstrated Visual Studio on Windows previously, modern .NET is fully cross-platform. We can install the .NET SDK on macOS and various Linux distributions. For example, on Ubuntu, we can install it using the APT package manager:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install -y dotnet-sdk-10.0
Installing the .NET 10 SDK on Ubuntu

  • Line 1: We update the local package index.

  • Line 2: We install the .NET 10 SDK package.

Managing SDKs and runtimes

We might have multiple versions of .NET installed on our machine. We can list the installed SDKs and runtimes using the CLI:

dotnet --list-sdks
dotnet --list-runtimes
Listing installed .NET versions

  • Line 1: This command outputs all installed SDKs.

  • Line 2: This command outputs all installed execution environments.

To guarantee a project uses a specific SDK version, we can pin it using a global.json file in the project root. This is highly recommended for team environments to ensure consistent builds:

{
  "sdk": {
    "version": "10.0.100"
  }
}
Pinning the SDK version

  • Lines 1–5: We instruct the .NET CLI to use exactly version 10.0.100 for this repository.